Colorado has a caucus system. Party activists are self-selected. The
selection takes place by the registered voter's voluntarily attending
his or her party precinct caucus in the spring of an election year. The
caucus attendees elect delegates to various party assemblies (county and
state). These assemblies subsequently vote the platform and select the
candidates. If more than one candidate gets at least 30 per cent of the vote there
will be a primary election for that candidacy.

At this point in American history, Colorado's hoary old caucus system
is almost unique. Both major parties have grown to hate the system, although
the Republicans continue to pay lip service to it while their elected
officials occasionally try covertly to spike it. The two major parties
would much rather operate like, say, the Communist Party, with the current
crop of delegates selecting any new delegates, rather than allowing those
members to be chosen in their own neighborhoods by their neighbors. But
the caucus system persists because the delegates to each year's assemblies
for both major parties are selected in the present manner and tend to
resist any hint of change.

The real-world result for democracy in Colorado has been rather interesting.
The caucus system was pretty much drying up about 15 years ago. Folks
just didn't want to get out of their house one Tuesday evening in the
spring and devote an evening to granfallooning with their fellow party
members from their precinct and dealing with the boring paperwork and
resolutions and voting and all the other impedimenta of democracy. Both
parties were edging towards legislation in the Colorado Assembly (that's
the constitutional name of our bicameral state legislature) abolishing
the caucus system until 1990, when a sudden turnaround took place.

What happened was that the religious right discovered the caucus system.
Activists for family values found that by organizing in advance, often
in church groups, they could pack the underattended caucuses and dominate
the election of delegates to the party assemblies. This would have worked
just fine with either party, given the prevailing low attendance, but
in practice the revolution was limited to the Republican party. In my
neighborhood, the Republican caucus went from 4 attendees in 1990 to 43
attendees in 1992.

So there transpired two or three election cycles in which Colorado Republicans
mostly lost seats or elected some rather wild-eyed characters (one of
whom, a state senator, was prone to complaining that he could hear Old
Scratch cackling in the Capitol dome). After the first shock of the religious
right selecting the candidates for the whole party, liberal and moderate
Republicans fought back by, obviously, attending their caucuses with greater
regularity than had been their wont. Also, over the years, the church
folks had trouble keeping up their advance organizing. When the Kingdom
didn't materialize immediately, i.e., when they found out that even pious
politicians often lie or overestimate their own ability to deliver, the
interest of the faithful waned somewhat. Subsequent IRS investigations
of the tax status of churches engaged actively in supporting partisan
political candidates cooled off the ardor of the pastors noticeably.

At present, the Republican situation seems stabilized at a level of caucus
attendance about twice that of the Democrats, who had undergone no such
insurgency. The net result has been a livelier Republican party
and a declining and largely impotent Democratic party in Colorado. There
is intellectual ferment among the Colorado Republicans where there's only
dry rot among the Democrats.

Attending my first Republican county assembly after years of attending
Democratic county assemblies, I expected the difference between the two
parties to be reflected in a contrast between their assemblies. It's true
that the Republican county assembly is better attended by about 50 per cent than
the corresponding Democrat county assembly. But guess what? As vibrant
as the Colorado Republican party rank and file is, at the organizational
level, if you don't know the names, it's pretty hard to tell which assembly
you are attending.

Oh, sure, there are some differences. Ever since the insurgency of the
'nineties most Republican officeholders and candidates are careful when
orating to remember to thank God out loud for something, despite their
savior's parabolic contrast between those who pray in public and those
who pray in a closet. But that's the essence of the religious right political
philosophy, the meticulous sequestering of every element of scripture
which hints that Christianity is not about seizing state power, not even
about minding other people's morals. It has always mystified me how one
can claim to be a Christian and not understand such simple injuctions
as "Judge not lest you be judged," "My kingdom is not of this world,"
and "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's."

But all the piety and wit is just local color. Let's face it: both major
parties are dominated by their corresponding national party. And the two
major national parties are really one party, the status quo party, the
power-sharing party. In my experience, what both Republican and Democrat
county assemblies boil down to is the chanting of shibboleths to the wild
cheering of the faithful. For the Democrats, these shibboleths are the
Three E's: Education, the Environment, and the Elderly. For the Republicans,
it's Right to Life, Second Amendment, lower taxes. Please understand that
I'm not criticizing any of these causes; I'm just observing
their transformation from ideological goals for public policy into shibboleths
reflecting no reasoned program of legislation. If I were as clever as
the late Marshall McLuhan, I'd coin a clever phrase along the lines of
"the medium is the message", maybe, "Shouted often enough and loudly enough,
the message becomes mere mood music."

The redeeming feature of the Jefferson County Republican county assembly
for me was being able to congratulate several Republican officeholders
for being instrumental in one of the finest pieces of Colorado legislation
in decades. The Republican majority in the Colorado House of Representatives
put through civil forfeiture reform, mandating that there be some
kind of criminal conviction in open court to validate any forfeiture action,
and taking out of the hands of the seizers, i.e., the district attorneys
and the police forces of Colorado, the disposition of goods and property
seized. The elimination of this obvious conflict of interest was protested
loudly and long by the district attorneys and police entities before the
Colorado House Judiciary Committee, but to no avail. The bill was reported
out of committee in the House, passed on largely a party line vote, and
then passed by the Colorado Senate by the majority of the Republican minority
and the minority of the Democrat Senate majority.

Since a couple of the Democratic state senators who had paid me fine
lip service for years on drug policy reform voted against this
long overdue measure, I'm still feeling good about my party switch.

Jack J. Woehr of Fairmount, Colorado, having now seen both major party
assemblies, feels himself to be roughly in the position of the lost soul
in the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon being prodded by the devil's
pitchfork in front of two doors, one labled "You Do" and the other "You
Don't" and being urged to hurry up and choose.